Slashdot Mirror
Following the Spam Trail
An anonymous reader writes "MSNBC's Bob Sullivan doggedly follows a spam trail from Alabama to Argentina to find out who actually benefits from spam. The beneficiaries aren't necessarily the pasty faced, high school drop out industrial spammers we have gotten to know, but well known companies."
MSNBC: we have known about the relationship between spam, lead generators, and legitimate businesses for years now. For example, when I filled out an add to enlarge my penis 3 years ago, I got all sorts of emails from GNC and other well known health and fitness companies.....oh wait, I mean, when I clicked on the "See Britney Nude XXX HOT Angelina J-Lo-XXX-HOT!" offer I got an ad from her record label and WareHouse Music in the mail. Yea, that's it.
FP
If you look towards the bottom of the MSNBC page linked in the story, there is a form that allows you to submit your spam stories, which asks for your name, hometown, phone number and e-mail address. Now what does MSNBC need with that information, in relation to your experiences with spam? Seems fishy to me...
I benefit from SPAM!
If you can nail down a domain that seems to profit, use the whois information and call them on the phone. I usually dont get spam after I have complained to a person. If the phone number is bogus you can report them at http://reports.internic.net/cgi/rpt_whois/rpt.cgi
-John Fenley
What "well known" company offers penis pumps? Has Gates been up to more no good?
Business \Busi"ness\, n.;
A scam in which all people involved perceive as beneficial...
The beneficiaries aren't necessarily the pasty faced, high school drop out industrial spammers we have gotten to know, but well known companies.
Wow, like we hadn't figured that out already.
All commercial advertising, SPAM included, benefits companies.
Individual spammers are just pawns like their more respectable counterparts in the legitemate marketing industry.
The unofficial
This article is written for an ignorant audience. I'm an ignorant audience and its smug tone of condescension even pisses me off.
Great, we get a bunch of moralizing from a bunch of jackasses who allow FUI banner ads on their site.
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
Greetings,
We need a vendor who can offer immediate supply.
I'm offering $5,000 US dollars just for referring a vender which is (Actually RELIABLE in providing the below equipment) Contact details of vendor required, including name and phone #. If they turn out to be reliable in supplying the below equipment I'll immediately pay you $5,000. We prefer to work with vendor in the Boston/New York area.
1. The mind warper generation 4 Dimensional Warp Generator # 52 4350a series wrist watch with z80 or better memory adapter. If in stock the AMD Dimensional Warp Generator module containing the GRC79 induction motor, two I80200 warp stabilizers, 256GB of SRAM, and two Analog Devices isolinear modules, This unit also has a menu driven GUI accessible on the front panel XID display. All in 1 units would be great if reliable models are available
2. The special 23200 or Acme 5X24 series time transducing capacitor with built in temporal displacement. Needed with complete jumper/auxiliary system
3. A reliable crystal Ionizor with unlimited memory backup.
4. I will also pay for Schematics, layouts, and designs directly from the manufature which can be used to build this equipment from readily available parts.
If your vendor turns out to be reliable, I owe you $5,000.
Email his details to me at: info@federalfundingprogram.com
Please do not reply directly back to this email as it will only be bounced back to you.
Anyone else get this one? =P
Free music from Jack Merlot.
how many "middle men" are in the typical spam food chain, playing the percentages. Extra bonuses for network names, IP addys, hosting providers, etc. And also, why don't these large companies have the balls to just do it directly, themselves? /me thinks they are much like the Wizard of Oz, in this regard.
C|N>K
The mystery is revealed. It is the The Hormel Food Company!
But seriously, does anyone here actually think people will care enough to boycott these companies?
Such is the messy world of affiliate marketing. Jeff Hain, director of marketing for LoanWeb, blamed his firm's involvement in the spam on an affiliate who acted outside the company's policies. The Internet is full of such arrangements, first popularized by Amazon.com years ago. Small Web sites that push traffic and business toward a larger firm get a small slice of the profits. It is often tempting for affiliates to send out spam to create such profitable traffic.
"We have thousands of affiliates out there," Hain said.
- Amazon.com still uses the affiliates programs to a great extent and Google searches often lead to sites that are nothing but links to Amazon's site in disguise. Wish Google searches could see through such tactics....
An entirely separate set of companies also benefits from the spam economy -- Internet service providers who carry their traffic.
Well-known spam nemesis Ron Scelson filed for bankruptcy earlier this year, and a review of bankruptcy documents shows he owes Bell South $56,463 for "circuits" and Cable & Wireless another $4,407 as his "Internet provider." Neither company responded to requests for information about the bills.
But it's hardly the first time a big-name Internet provider has been caught in a deal with a spammer. In an embarrassing incident for both AT&T and PSINet three years ago, both firms were caught as participants in secret "pink contracts" with spammers. Long suspected in the spam world, the revelations exposed pink contracts as sweetheart deals for the Internet firms, designed to protect spammers. ISPs get premium, well above normal rates, to sell bandwidth to known spammers. In exchange, the ISP agrees to suffer more than normal complaint rates. In PSINet's contract, revealed on News.com, the firm received an upfront payment of $27,000 from Cajunnet, a marketing firm based in Slidell, La. In exchange, PSINet agreed to permit Cajunnet to send unsolicited email "in mass quantity" through PSINet's lines.
- Is there no legal way to stop ISP's from doing that ?
After IC Marketing received our data, it sold our information to a firm named Infoclear Marketing in Dallas, which then sold it to Mleads, which in turn sold it to Quicken, according to Newman.
Infoclear immediately terminated its contract with IC Marketing when it heard about the spam offense, said Patrick Thurmond, who identified himself as a founder of Infoclear.
Doesn't it sound a lot like InfoClear and IC (coincidence?) are actually the same company, but can appear to 'sever ties' whenever anyone anti-spam starts nosing around.. sounds like a nice setup to me, and the investigators won't implicate poor infoclear when tracing this back.
Just my $0.02.
Thinko
"I have challenged the entire quality assurance team to a bat'leth contest. They will not concern us again."
What's that you say? Backbones don't police spam across their networks, spam that sucks up huge amounts of bandwidth, which they can charge people for? Whoa!
Next at 11, employees who are responsible for self-policing timecard policies are ripping off employers!
(seriously though- it's time we started taking major networks to task, like refusing to route packets coming from them, or refusing to send traffic to them. Watch how fast UUnet takes care of spammers, when customers find they suddenly can't get to sites. Pretty much the ONLY thing these days that separates backbones is how reliable they are- even a slight decrease in reliability, even just perceived or threatened, could have an astounding effect. Think of all the fuss SCO is causing to see the possibilities.)
Please help metamoderate.
How many Sysadmins are running spam filters to catch that crap so the end user never sees it?
-- Some days you're the dog; some days you're the hydrant.
Pay no attantion to the man behind that firewall!
Support Israeli punk bands. Man Alive.
I'm becoming more and more convinced that the only effective way to fight back is to spam the spammers. Not via email, but via their customer databases. Take the example of from this article: the spammers get paid for every lead they generate. But, if just 1% of the people who got the spam went to the site and *lied* about their identity, and their interest, the value of the list containing their info would go down so much as to make it worthless. Even if .1% of the people did this, it would dramatically reduce the value of such customer lists. That's the only way to stop spam, from what I can see: make it no longer economically viable.
According to the story, it seems like MSNBC was responsible for the termination of at least three business relations between "Legitimate" companies and spammers.
If only more news outlets traced their spam the same way, it could put a dent in the demand for spam.
Who am I kidding? Those spammers, er "lead generators" will go right back to work, selling to anyone who will buy, no questions asked. As long as businesses will pay for personal information, there will be plenty of weasels to sell it to them.
paying attention to the spam i got, i managed to get a great morgage on a house, marry a beautiful russian bride, and i pleasure her every night with my enlarged, viagra powered penis.
now, if only i could get some printer toner...
and it's always about the money...ank
Still hoping for Gentle Treatment...
Guess the IT work for the board of education didn't work out eh?
we do have computers in Alabama.
And electricity.
And indoor plumbing.
No, and it would be dangerous if there were.
The inhibiting factor for most is simply the risk of being blackholed by the rest of us if they do.
Sadly there are a few that have such a huge chunk of the net under their thumb they are basically immune to this threat. I think that's the number two contributor to the spam problem (number one being fools that buy from spamvertisers.)
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Interesting, if what the article says about the 20 dollar fee is true. Perhaps we can end spam by answering it.
Facinating.
An entirely separate set of companies also benefits from the spam economy -- Internet service providers who carry their traffic... In exchange, the ISP agrees to suffer more than normal complaint rates. In PSINet's contract, revealed on News.com, the firm received an upfront payment of $27,000 from Cajunnet, a marketing firm based in Slidell, La. In exchange, PSINet agreed to permit Cajunnet to send unsolicited email "in mass quantity" through PSINet's lines."
Maybe this might drum some sense into somethingawful.com's heads.
I made a comment 2 days earlier about this. If you do business with ISP's that work hand in glove with spammers, don't go around whining that SPEWS is the one to blame.It's time to speak out! The political views of NERDS are usually very liberated. Start wearing your views! Speak Out!!!
Nerd Gear:
POLITINERD
Read the article about mortgage rates. Guess what a popup advertised? Yup mortgage rates
Fantastic
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
Wonder why...
Good!
Their stuff was getting too expensive anyway. Some Indian R&D should spruce it up and allow them to sell it at a discount here.
The story ends with the conclusion that the existence of spam is the consumers fault. The assertion is that if spam didn't generate responses and, in turn, revenue, these business interests wouldn't bother causing it to be created, however indirectly.
That logic is hard to argue with, but I have an additional way to fault the consumer. Why does the consumer continue to tolerate the open sewer that is contemporary email? It's not just spam. Millions of these sheeple have been infected with viruses sent via email. Spam and viruses, and a seaming endless ability to tolerate large quantities of both...
One would think that after enough of this crap occurred, consumers would eventually consider dealing with it. RTFA to discover that you can't count on ISPs to deal with it. They value spammers and the extra money they're willing to pay. RTFA to discover that respectable companies participate via a web of indirection and plausible deniability. The only thing we have is the end user. If the end user isn't willing to deal with the problem, no one will.
If the end user was willing to deal with the problem, then it becomes a simple matter. All that would be needed is a requirement that senders provide a verifiable signature in all messages, and easy to use white lists to remember the 'ok' parties. If the end user were willing to a.) obtain a cert that allows them to sign and b.) tolerate the need to not blindly open mail that hadn't been placed on their white-list previously, spam would not exist.
The key here is the end user. Until they come around spam is inevitable.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
I don't see what the problem is. I don't get spam any more.
Now, granted, I run my own mail server: Exim, attached to SpamAssassin via SA-Exim. And this combination is highly effective. I have it set up to be more aggressive than most people would want their spam filter to be; if an incoming message even *smells* like spam, my server refuses to accept it and instead gives a failure message with an alternate non-filtered address to use if the email wasn't actually spam. In a year of running it, it's rejected 100 spams per day on average, with only one known false positive in the entire year (it was someone forwarding a spam to me). And if a spam is sent to one of the addresses which I haven't used for years, then I perform the added courtesy of tarpitting the spammer.
But there are a lot of tactics that an ISP's mail server can use to cut down on a huge amount of spam without risking false positives. Check the mail against Razor and the other services which keep track of mass-mailings which have been reported as spam, for example. Refuse mail from a server which pipelines its SMTP commands then drops its connection without waiting for a response. Verify that the sending mail server's address actually can be resolved.
ISP's could go a long way towards making spam much less of an annoyance if they'd just use software to filter out the obvious spams. Hook the mail server up to SpamAssassin, set the threshold high enough to avoid false positives.
as this was a a mortage related spam - aka respectable spam - as opposed to the unrespectable spam like "enlarge ..." spam, it is not too off track to show how the big corporations are lobbying for the ability to send spam directly rather than thru these layers ...
It is also very interesting that the big companies like Microsoft are paying lobbyists for laws that shall allow them to send spam, on the pretext that if only their spam is identified as spam it is no longer spam. I might give my email id to a Microsoft division, and then without my permission it is available to all the divisions of microsoft - even if I have no interest in all their products save one for which I gave my email - so isn't all the unrelated email they send me now spam ???
What the big companies want to do is to send spam themselves, but prevent others from sending it. All knowing that spam is dirt cheap tool for sales, but there is only so much spam a consumer can take before the backlash hurts all spammers ...
it is pure and simple application of game theory - when it becomes lucrative enough for the politicians, they will step into it too ...
To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
Thing is, how could that be implemented? All told, there aren't all THAT many backbones to work with. Take out UUNet, or AT&T, and you've blocked off a very big part of the market. From a business standpoint, it would be equivalent to deciding not to sell to anyone in, say Great Britain. Principle's fine, but that's going to cut into profits. I worked for Sprint for a while, and their network is severely overengineered. The fibre backbones are generally only using 10% of their capacity. So long as that's the case, the beancounters are going to continue to search for ways to get more money out of that resource. They'll keep looking for - and finding - loopholes that allow them to sell their bandwidth. They'll keep doing this so long as they don't have anything better to sell their bandwidth for.
I would put money into a cause that went after spammers that attack me in hopes of enforcing state laws and potentially winning a lawsuit against them.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Which makes telephoning expensive.
If you mention what your email address is to a spamer, they *may* stop sending you spam, but now that you have legitimized an address, build an ark and wait for the flood!
People still don't get it....
No new spam laws are needed to stop spam.
99.9% of the spam on the Internet already is illegal and many cases criminal, involving the theft of computer resources and bandwidth, mail relay hijacking, forged headers, etc.
The problem is the Feds won't enforce the existing laws on the books. Unless there is X amount of damage involved to a specific politically-connected corporation, they turn the other cheek.
People need to ask their local District Attorney to start prosecuting these cases. A friend of mine had a spammer break into his computer and he filed a report with the FBI. They identified exactly who the spammer was and had all the logs and everything, and the DA refused to prosecute or pursue the case. This is the problem! Law enforcement authorities aren't enforcing the laws!!
The article describes how "affiliates" get paid for supplying information gleaned from people who respond to spam e-mails.
This suggests that the economics of spamming could be disrupted rather easily if large numbers of folks would helpfully supply the information that the spammers seek.
Think about it. What would happen if every time a slashdotter got a spam, he responded with all the personal information (randomized, of course) that the spammer requested? The article used the example of a web form that the spamee was invited to fill in with his mortgage information.
A perl script could generate a lot of fills to the web form in a short period of time.
In the short term, affiliates would make extra money by selling truckloads of (phony) personal information. But within a few monthes, the large companies that pay for that information would wise up. That's when the spam economy would start to suffer.
This strategy is only interesting to those of us that have good spam filters in place. I'm getting very good results with bogofilter now. I believe that I could "survive" the major spam wave that would result if I employed this strategy. But this strategy would be a lot more effective if I had some company.
Start your own "spam" company as part of the slashdot program to end spam. Solicit e-mail addresses from willing slashdotters who provide the desired false leads. You get both the benefit of bogus leads and the windfall from all the extra false leads
In advertising there are divisions much like the white red black hats of hackers. Often times a company will submit a block of money to an advertising group, which will then employ dozens of different strategies. Often times, these techniques are not follow known or endorsed by the sponsoring company.
Take for instance when IBM launched a "edgy" campaign where peace signs were spray painted on the sidewalks of SanFran. Or some TV show that quietly advertised by sending a non-existant football team to various locations claiming to have one state finals, when in actuallity, it was a ploy to get name recognition.
Spam is simply a new form of information dissemination. It is not Microsoft or any other giant who is actively pushing this, but marketing and advertising firms who are supported by them. So you have to make a distinction because the big advertisers are linked to just about every big company.
Anyway...
Dream on.
Spare us from all the lame jokes.
Worse than porcine snouts.
If you buy Hormel,
SCO and IBM
Won't sue your tail off.
Write your own and submit them to:
http://www.spamhaiku.com/spamhaiku/site/
SPEWS can be used to pressure spam-friendly ISPs into dropping their spamming customers. It's perfectly legal, but then you'll get a bunch of whiners who think that they shouldn't be blocked just for giving money to an outfit that they know is run by criminals.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
It's summer time. I go back to work/school in another 11 days.
In NY, it is illegal to post posters on private property without the owner's permission. This includes the movie posters on construction site wood 4x8 panels protecting the site, and on city owned telephone poles.
The problem NYC used to have is that they rarely caught someone in the act of posting the poster.
So they changed the law.
What NYC did, was make the company in the advertisement responsible for the fines for illegal posting.
Simple.
Effective.
So why can't we do the same for spam? While the real reason we have spam is that the big spammers, like aol, ms, time warner, and others are fiercly protecting their right to "email market" their companies, so they are deeply funding lobbyists to protect spam. So since you can't outlaw spam for one legit company, while allowing it for another (selling "viagra" isn't illegal for pharmacies), so we have an exploding spam problem, and legislators that don't give a shit, but "lament" about the problem in public, but resigning themselves that they can't do anything about it.
And that do not spam list is a sick joke. As one spammer actually testified in Washington, he would view that list as a "target rich environment". Which part of this don't the stupid legislators understand? Look, voters, I did something about spam. Yeah, I know you are getting even more now, but at least I did something. And I feel your pain.
What needs to be done: Make the companies mentioned in the spam responsible for stiff, per spam, fines.
Since we can't block all spam thanks to the deep pockets of ms, aol, tw and others, we can do it this way:
Make the companies and individuals advertising via spam (not the sender, the company benefitting from the actual spam) liable for $50 per spam x2, $500 per spam x2, collectible by both isp providers, and by the recipients. You can set a maximum fine, but make the fine high, and per day, not total. Then make the maximum as two seperate maximums, one for the isps, and one for the recipients, so the isps don't bankrupt the company by taking all the money.
Who gets fined? Any company/individual in the spam that relies on a spam mailer that uses a forged header, that uses an open relay, that uses a fake return email address, that uses a mail server that doesn't reverse resolve, that uses robots to harvest email addresses off the internet or usenet, that fails to immediately remove someone who opts out.
Make the company/individual in the spam the responsible party for the email list. If that company shares any opt out email recipient with another company (or the spam mailer, as the company's authorized agent), or another division, or for another product, after that recipient has requested removal, make it another violation, then double the penalties on any additional penalties that the spammer is charged with.
Fixing spam is easy. Nail the company/individual that benefits from the spam, regardless of who sends it. And forget about hiding. Any company has to be registered. Even those that wish to remain private, the government can find out the info. And individuals can be tracked down even easier.
Make the violations criminal as well as fines.
Then add the laws to treaties with every other nation.
At a minimum, this will drive out of business the spammers in south florida. And elsewhere in the US and other trading partners.
There's no excuse for spam. Something can be done. Saying nothing can be done, and you are part of the problem, not the solution.
one name like C...!
YOU FAIL IT! btw, it's Cabal. Back to the masturbation community with you.
That could be effective, if the spamvertised product or service requires some human time or money to process. Mortgages, for example. If each mortage application that looks remotely serious takes 30 minutes of some human's time to process, a relatively low bogus reply rate could swamp them, and make it unprofitable.
If there is no time or money required to process the orders (for example, some medicinal product the spammer never intended to send anyway), then a high bogus return rate won't make a difference.
I think the only way to stop spam is to ban selling of email address lists. For any purpose. Except, of course for the protected solicitaions; charities, non-profits, etc. Spam on the client side is nearly impossible and a losing proposition to stop. If the selling of addresses is illegal, then companies cannot spam you. Of course this has some slight problems, like email scrapers, but that could come under simpler laws.
Die, SCO, DIE!
I did NOT learn everything I need to know in kindergarten.
Or they'll just profit more and fuck the users still.
Anyone find it funny that the article asks: "How does unsolicited commercial e-mail affect you?" and then prompts for your email address?
Oh well, I'll bite.
I don't agree with using SPEWS, as I think it's too drastic, but SPEWS has a right to exist. I should also point out that there is no case of slander/libel as SPEWS keeps evidence. As for staying totally anonymous, they don't want to be spammed, theatened, or be litigated into oblivion. Also, Seeing as how it's the ISP's bandwidth, the ISP's have the right to use, opr ignore SPEWS. Yes, places like SA get caught in the middle, but, honestly, if it's just places like SA, I really don't want them. They're, quite frankly, just childish.
Also, this is a case of consumer ignorance. If a customer does not know they their ISP uses SPEWS, then it's their own damn fault.
When all else fails, use Hotmail, or setup your own mail server.
--LordKaT
Particularly when there is nothing stopping them from setting up another fake company and "selling" the leads to themselves again.
Infoclear terminates its relationship with IC and immediately starts another relationship with C Marketing.
When it is found out that C Marketing uses spam, C Marketing is dumped.
And a new relationship is formed with I Marketing.
lather
rinse
repeat
As long as companies like Quicken are willing to PAY for "leads", there will be a market.
Simply put, spam pays. It's easy money for very little effort. There are no risks. And you can work from home.
Hey, that sounds like a lot of the spam I get.
"The beneficiaries aren't necessarily the pasty faced, high school drop out industrial spammers we have gotten to know, but well known companies."
... The engineers will be fighting internally with the sales managers, but of course the sales managers always win."
:-)
Been well known for quite a while now. Check out the famous spamdemic map. Real marketing takes work to make it successful, but mainsleaze bozos like Ameriquest slack off with these "shortcuts".
"Most of the ISPs are good to their word and are fighting it very, very hard," he said. "But as you get into the larger ISPs, especially those that are in any form of financial difficulty, the engineers, abuse staff and technicians all want the spammers off the network, but you have the sales staff looking at the money.
Which is why these ISPs should not complain when I use some choice blackhole lists like SPEWS, Spamhaus, or SpamCop to protect my inboxes from these sleazoids. Anyone remember when Aegis thought they were invincible when they allowed spammers to run amuck on their system? And where are they now?
[I am not a covert ops agent of the Lumber Cartel (tinlc).]
!@#$% whole-grain cereal. When I want fiber, I eat some wicker furniture. - G. Carlin
You see, most of that stuff stuff is made in sunny Southern California... Swedish Erotica (A.K.A. Cal Exotics) is in Chino CA.
Yet Another Anti-Spam Technique:
Whenever you receive SPAM go to their website and place fake orders.
Not once or twice but thousands of times. Write a script and run it in background
which cooks up real sounding names, addresses, email addresses and sign up
for their deals. When this information makes it up the chain to the affiliates
who sell it to the big brand companies they eventually realise that information
gotten from this source is "no good". That should put that affiliate / sub-affiliate
out of business.
Registrant Organization: Zonda Sistemas S.A..
Address: Callao 1253
City: Postal Buenos Aires
Postal Code: 1024
Country: Argentina
Telephone: 4803-3824
Fax: 4803-3824
Main Activity: Systems
Responsible Person: Alberto Meyer Robert
Address: Callao 1253
City: Postal Buenos Aires
Postal Code: 1024
Country: Argentina
Telephone: 4803-3824
Hour Contact: 10-18
Date of recording: 20/01/2003
Organization Administrator: Zonda Sistemas S.A..
Address: Callao 1253
City: Buenos Aires
Postal Code: 1024
Country: Argentina
Telephone: 4803-3824
Fax: 4803-3824
Main Activity: Systems
Tecnicnal Contact: Alberto Meyer Robert
Address: Callao 1253
City: Buenos Aires
Postal Code: 1024
Country: Argentina
Telephone: 4803-3824
Hour Contact: 10-18
Fax: 4803-3824
Servants of Name of Dominion
Primary Servant of Names:
Name: ns.super-zonda.com
Direction IP:
Secondary servant of Names:
Name: ns1.super-zonda.com
Direction IP:
Third Servant of Names:
Name: ns2.super-zonda.com
Direction IP:
Fourth Servant of Names:
Name: ns3.super-zonda.com
Direction IP:
personal note - i kinda like the sound of 'Primary Servant of Names' over 'name server one'.
"Four days later, four companies sent us an e-mail indicating they knew we were looking for a new mortgage". Four days!! With the myriad layers of 'affiliates', 'lead generators', and 'spammers' operating in legally grey areas and distributed all over the world, it's amazing that it takes only this long to get a response. I mean, sometimes it takes longer to get a response from legitimate online tech support!
The article opens by saying "There wouldn't be spam if there wasn't money in spam". Truer words were never uttered. And there wouldn't be money in spam if consumer demand didn't exist. All 'solutions' to the spam problem that fail to take this 'demand' problem into account are, IMO, doomed to failure.
Imposing Libertarian views on everyone online since 1992.
My management recently asked me to compile some statistics about our inbound email usage. They were shocked that we are filtering (without a significant number of false-positives) ~90% of all inbound SMTP connections/messages.
Interestingly, they then "Quest ioned" what percentage of SPAM was coming from our current ISP - we are now in the process of migrating to a new ISP, partly based on this statement in their quarterly earnings report released just a couple of weeks ago:
During the second quarter, the company terminated a number of customers engaged in spam practices that violated the company's acceptable use policy, amounting to approximately $1.1 million in lost annualized revenues. In addition, Internap terminated discussions with a number of prospective customers engaged in spam practices and tightened its customer screening procedures.
Perhaps if more Fortune 500 companies would realize they are funding the problem (i.e. tolerating ISP's with pink contracts as the article stated,) then they are part of the problem.
Based on this experience, I propose a "SPAM Awareness Day" where we will turn off all filters in order to demonstrate the problem to any and all clueful IT management. Any ideas for a date?
Bunghole mods
That's pretty bizarre.
Free music from Jack Merlot.
Don't know if the ads are static or dynamic, but the one I got, in the middle of an article about sleazy tactics and spammers, was a "CLICK HERE TO ENTER THE GREEN CARD LOTTERY!!!!!"
Heh.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
This must be a fake. Not many time travellers are stuck here, for sure. So it looks we have one guy here only.
/. post, travel back in time and give him the thingies he wants - at the first location already, so there is no need for a second time-date-coordinate.
;)
Out of logic it follows this guy is either no time traveller or he is meant to be left alone (be arrested here or something).
If he were a real time traveller, he need not change time and place where to send the device (see other f'ups). This is because in future someone will see this
The only solution is, that apparently nobody wants this poor guy. Mee too, especially if this is something like a preparation for a new Blair Witch Project
-Tino, incarnated as Anonymous Coward
This is why Sneakemail was created over 3 years ago. You can easily bust whoever benefits from your stolen/sold email address no matter how far down the chain it goes. For those who don't know Sneakemail was the first disposable email address service which was designed both for keeping your address clean and tracking those selling your address. Sneakemail got a mention in this months MIT Technology review magazine.
Sneakemail is to spam filters what an ounce of prevention is to a pound of cure.
Add this one: 9. news.admin.net-abuse.* is not SPEWS.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
What should happen is that the companies that are ultimately hiring the spammers - Ameriquest, Quicken Loans, LoanWeb, and Ivy Mortgage - should be legally obliged to keep an audit trail for every contact email they send out on their "bought leads." Then if one of their "leads" complains, and they cannot provide a spam-free audit trail, they pay a fine.
As it is, they can say they have a "no tolerance" policy for spam (ha!), but there is no teeth to it; one person complains, and one relationship gets "severed", but no one really suffers, and the affiliate can pop right back up with another batch of "legitimate" leads the very next day. Once the companies have incentive to actually police their own affiliates, the profit margin for spamming goes way down.
-renard
that would be after you visited msn.com
? ww w.msnbc.com/news/create_p1.asp?URL=www.msnbc.com/n ews/943255.asp&0cv=KA01
but wait you didnt visit msn right ? you visited msnbc.com
have a look at your headers and look where you get redirected to
http://msid.msn.com/mps_id_sharing/redirect.asp
all that (4 redirects to be exact) just to drop a cookie on you so those dirty fuckers can track around the msn domain keeping their GUID intact
kettle meet pot
There is a utility called FormFucker which spams web forms.
It analyzes the web form and then makes 1000s of submissions using realistic-looking but fake names, addresses, zip codes, telephone numbers, credit card numbers, etc.
Note that use of FF is very controversial, as many consider it fighting-abuse-with-abuse.
http://www.pc-help.org/privacy/ms_guid.htm
or here
or here
The article points out how ISPs will ignore their rules when the spammers slip them a little extra cash. And then, at the head of the Slashdot list of comments, the most violently anti-Microsoft site I know has: a Microsoft ad!
Every time I read an article about spam, I see a bunch of people promoting the spam filters on their system, or their ISP, or some other way of dealing with spam at the destination.
The only way to deal with spam is at the source. The only way to stop spammers is to keep them from sending their shite in the first place. As soon as it leaves their computer, it becomes an arms race--we get better filters, they figure out a new way around them, we tweak our filters again. Eventually the entire email system worldwide becomes one big armed camp, and that's BAD! Worse yet, I see people proposing we go straight to that end right now, as a solution.
We have to stop spammers from being able to spam, not stop the spam from reaching us.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
You are wrong on two counts, or more.
First off, you are wrong on the political will. My solution doesn't have to start in washington. iirc, washington state, and possibly oregon have stiffer anti-spam statutes than on a federal level. A few other states may have laws that are stiffer as well.
It will only take one state, on a state level, to implement what I'm talking about. From there, as soon as the fines and prosecutions start, the companies will scatter like cockroaches, as mentioned in the article. The political will is there, on a local level. It only takes one, and several states have already shown that they are willing to step into the fire.
Next error:
Open smtp. That doesn't remove the liability of the company that benefits from the spam. It's simple. Just like the author/reporter did, send fake/authorized information for the mortgage offer. Just like attorneys general across the US do every day in their sting operations. When a mortgage company responds, the onerous is on them to prove that they complied with the law. Or that the email was maliciously sent. If the email was maliciously sent, they wouldn't be responding. And even if the email was maliciously sent, if they are following up in the hope of making a sale, then bam! They are liable. That's it. It's that simple.
The onerous will be on the company to prove that they 1. followed the law, 2. did not benefit from email that was sent with faked headers, open relays, or other spammer techniques. If it was, they are liable.
Fake spam from ms? Why would we put a requirement on other businesses to be able to document their email marketing, making their spam traceable, and not require this of ms? Is ms benefitting from the spam? If they are, then they are part of the problem. And are liable. And maybe the fines/criminal laws need a boost for the fake spam. As hard as some techies can make it to catch them, a sizeable number still get caught. And if it is a problem, then ms needs to innovate and come up with a technological solution themselves. Or stop using email marketing, period. They can still get their spam out through billions of hotmail footers daily.
And your fake spam email/relay shows you didn't get my post. If they send spam through an open relay, they are still advertising a legitimate company. Not reverse resolvable? Not confirmable by checking the ip addresses? Then the company in the spam is liable. Which part don't you understand?
While the companies will bitch and moan, they will clean their act up quickly. Instead of using a spammer that operates out of his garage or basement, legitimate email "marketers" will then go to email senders who 1. have a track record of complying with the law, 2. have insurance or can post a bond and will indemnify the companies for illegal actions, and 3. comply with opt out wishes of recipients.
As soon as the possibility of liability crops up to legitimate businesses, they will seek legal and financial protection, and will clean up their act for the most part. Those that don't will be made examples of in state courts, and will then comply. Or go away.
As for a technological solution, there's been bitching and moaning about the whole process for years. Yet we have a doubling of spam in one year. Are you suggesting that we can replace the entire system by August 2004? Really? Everybody? In the meantime, will everyone be able to handle another doubling of spam?
While a technological solution may be the only way in your eyes, you need to open your eyes a bit further. Technology is not the problem here. If there was no electronic emails being sent right now, we'd still be seeing doubling and tripling of regular snail mail. And with the 911 addresses being adopted everywhere, it's now easier than ever to send mail even to rural addresses. Especially since with the new rural addressing, the post offices are now delivering junk mail where it previously wasn't possible or allowed due t
I think this is a problem more to be blamed on clueless sys-admins than organizations like SPEWs. Remember, it is the sys admin, not the the black hole who is choosing to accept the message.
People who filter based on spews and others alike basically don't care about getting a 1%-10% of false positives. To an individual that might be cool, but try setting up that policy in your workplace server.
I have my filters based on spamhaus, blitzed and dsbl. The analysis, done by sgifford was a real eye opener. I recommend it to anybody in charge of running a realiable server with black list filtering enabled.
My other OS is the MCP!
What NYC did, was make the company in the advertisement responsible for the fines for illegal posting.
Simple.
Effective.
GREAT! I'll just print out my SPAMS and plaster them all over NYC!
Let NY track em down and prosecute them!
http://dragonsquillandink.com/homework/timebottle. html
:)
That's where it comes from!
It appears alot of major organizations and buisneses from all around the globe seem to have some part in the mailing industry one way or another...
EMAIL ADVERTISING and Advertising period makes the world go round. It will be here and will always be here no matter what we do. It will never be stopped as too many bigger organizations along with smart mailers will always be one step ahead/have the money/connections to keep their behinds clean. Spam is not only on the internet, we see forms of "spam" daily everywhere we go..
spam is a big problem that has been around for a long time but sadly, it will never go away. As hard was we try to get laws passed and report spammers they will not stop. Last year i did a research paper and it was all about spam. What i found out is that spammers do not host thier pages in the usa, they use anonymous offshore bulletproof servers in hong kong, china, korea, russia, sweden, canada, and a list of others. The problem is that these bulletproof hosts simply don't care if thier customers spam to the pages because there are no cyber crimes in these countries. Countries like china and hong kong know that spam can bring them lots of cash without very many problems. I'm sure the usa won't declare war on them for ignoring spam complaints, no other country will care because they are all getting thier share of the money too. While doing my research i found a forum of people who were all spammers, i can't remember the name but they had about 500 members who often posted information such as affiliate networks that allowed you to spam, email lists for sale, bulletproof hosting, and even hacked computers that ran proxy servers in order to avoid getting cought. When i read all this i quickly came to the thought that these spammers are nothing but scum and a parasite to online users. But then i ran into the people who are doing everything they can to fight the war against spam. These people are known as anti-spammers and sometimes do crazy things to try and stop a spammer. One anti-spammer got an email from a company offering mortgage loans, he quickly did a trace route to find the isp and every phone number he could. He then got on his phone and began to place calls to the isp, the domain register and the isp of the ip that was showed in the headers. He then sent emails to the isp's and filed complaints. He then made another post talking about how he wasted 2 hours on the phone talking to isp's about the person who sent him the spam but it did not help because they just ignored his complaint. He then claimed that this is why he hates spam, because it often makes him call up a few people and argue for long periods of time but i then thought to myself. If he would just click that box thats to the left of his email and click delete it would have only taken him 5 seconds and he could have moved on with his life. Anti spammers often claim that spam takes up lots of time, but they would rather spend many hours a week on the phone and sending emails complaining about the spam they recieved in thier mailbox. Now i can understand being angry about recieving 200 spam emails a day like most anti spammers claim but there is a reason why they do get so much spam. As it turns out, anti spammers don't just get spam out of nowhere, they go around the internet and put out thier email address everywhere and anywhere they can, often in newsgroups and the guestbooks that some sites have. They place thier email in sites that are known to resell your email address to spammers. I thought this was flat out stupid, i see so many posts of anti spammers complaining about how many emails they get but the only reason they get it is because they go around the internet to attract it on purpose and then file complaints to the isp's. The thing is that most of these sites will say that they have the right to do whatever they want to your email address and are allowed to sell it and that your email address may be sold to a spammer. But Isn't submitting thier address everywhere doing so the exact opposite of thier goals? They claim they don't want spam and don't want to waste time because of spam. But when they go around and do this it makes me think that they are just people with nothing better to do so they complain. But this is not the only action they take against spam. Often they will perform a DDoS on the hosting company and sometimes even the routers of the isp of the ip in the mail headers in order to discourage spamming. They also make bomb threats, murder threats, and will even go as far as stealing the spammers cars. I guess this is the reaso
Noticeably absent is any mention of Microsoft's support of spam, including their spammer-for-hire subsidiary, bCentral.com
Listbuilder is one of the worst at harvesting email addresses from any source they can get their hands on.
It's simple: I demand prosecution for torture.
The companies throw money out, then don't know what the advertisers do with the money? How does this let them off the hook?
In NYC, when the companies were held liable for individuals posting posters on light poles, and were fined, they protested they didn't know who was doing it. This was the exact situation with the small movie studios giving money to a marketing firm, and that marketing firm turning around and hiring people to hand the movie poster announcements on construction sites, abandoned buildings, and city property. So in your exact situation, in NYC, the companies in the advertisement, who didn't hang the posters, had to pay up.
NYC construction sites, city property, and light poles went from ugly sites that were plastered with layer upon layer upon layer of movie posters, to nothing. This happened virtually overnight after the fines starting being imposed and upheld. The companies protested, and they lost. And had to pay. And the posting dropped to virtually nothing.
And as for your ibm analogy, in NYC, where they also did the peace sign campaign, the reaction was swift and immediate. Even though ibm has a building with many employees in NYC, and contributes a lot to the local economy, they received telephone calls from city officials as soon as the news reporters started inquiring, which was the next day. The peace sign postings stopped, and if I recall correctly, a spokeperson even went on one of the local news stations and said that it would be cleaned up. The specific law I mentioned above was brought up by some city officials, and ibm was staring at fines of $100, or $150, or whatever the fine is, for each and every peace sign posted, regardless of whether it was paint or chalk.
As for san francisco and ibm's peace campaign, can't help you with info about that, as I doubt they have nyc's anti-posting law which holds companies in the ads responsible, they have willie brown as mayor, support taxpayer funded sex change operations, and have a bunch of other wacky, to put it nicely, laws. It wouldn't surprise me a bit if ibm had the right to piss on police officers' legs in san francisco.
So the distinction you are making, the big companies being linked to marketing and advertising firms, therefore they can't be responsible is backasswards. That is precisely the distinction. If ibm decides to email their peace signs to everyone, along with their marketing message, unsolicited, and they use a spam mailer to do it, who forges headers, who fails to provide a working return email address, who's mail server doesn't reverse resolve, who uses other tactics that spammers use, and IBM is benefitting from this, ie: their message is meant to raise awareness of their company, their product, or sell a product or service, then ibm gets fined, not the spammer. And not the advertising or marketing firm. IBM is responsible for who they hire to spread their message. Just as a contractor is responsible for their sub-contractor's actions on a job site. Or just as, in NYC, any company is responsible for the illegal posting actions of any marketing firm they hire to post posters.
How many times does this have to be explained to you?
I had a mindo when I read tha theadline. I swore it said "Following the Sperm Trail". Sadly, I reread the headline and saw it was just worthless spam. And I do mean worthless. Spam costs two bucks for 12 ounces. Sperm can get you $50 a shot!
jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]
Oh yeah, I know him. A real wing nut. He was odd when I met him in 2007, and I must say he's even stranger now, er, then. Who would use an Acme 5X24 anyway? Those things are so unstable... kind of like he is, really.
As discussed here, an intrepid blogger actually went to one of the pickup points. What he observed was somewhat... strange.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
(Those in the Boston area will get it).
"And a voice was screaming: 'Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?'" - HST
After all, M$ pays Slashdot to run these ads, but if, as you say (and I agree), everyone here hates M$, then no one is going to click on the ads are they?
/. money for nothing, after all, it's better in our pockets than theirs right?
Me, I don't even SEE ads in my web browsing anymore, or popups, or dodgy Javascript etc, all thanks to a wonderful program called The Proxomitron.
So let M$ give
Quizo69
Visceral Psyche Films
...now I must admit I don't know about wholesale price of bandwidth, but my residential access has gotten cheaper and cheaper (or conversely, faster and faster). What does that mean to a spammer? Lower cost/mail, or more mails/$
On the other hand, the time involved to identify and delete one spam mail remains quite constant, and it is at best a temporary solution when the filters get smarter.
Actually, I find it scary that 1 in 1000 spam mails are actually answered. I mean, I've gotten probably 50 SPAM messages advertizing the same product (say any one of penis enlargement, herbal viagra, nigarian moneylaundry). If we assume that no idiot will buy it multiple times, that means that 1 in 20 is buying it.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
If the end user was willing to deal with the problem, then it becomes a simple matter. All that would be needed is a requirement that senders provide a verifiable signature in all messages, and easy to use white lists to remember the 'ok' parties. If the end user were willing to a.) obtain a cert that allows them to sign and b.) tolerate the need to not blindly open mail that hadn't been placed on their white-list previously, spam would not exist.
Part of the point of having an email address is so that people can conract me without having a prior relationship. Just as I don't have a whitelist of who can put a letter in my physical mailbox. Only there people pay to send, not I to recieve, which keeps advertisements to a reasonable level.
What *would* help would be a real traceable email without going through a bunch of hoops so that I could be reasonably sure johndoe@hotmail.com actually is him and sent from hotmail, and not a trojaned residential DSL routing through a open relay in China that has nothing to do with neither the email address or hotmail. I would suggest the following.
1. Reverse MX look-up
2. Server signed messages (so you know for real which servers it passed through)
3. Report-back function servers along the chain, particularly first (if rouge user) and last (your ISP) for proactive spam filtering by them.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
...is something that should be integrated in the next generation mail protocol. Of course it doesn't help with publicly availiable addresses like on business cards, but if you could then alias everything after the first "point of contact", it'd be great. It doesn't have to be separate accounts (they like to charge extra for that), just one big "aliased" inbox...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The next level in spam systems is to get some cooperation from a bank that issues credit cards. Have them give you credit card numbers which will never pass authorization, but for which, whenever the number is used, the transaction information is immediately transmitted to the cardholder, identifying the merchant to which the money would have been paid.
This creates a trail that provides evidence allowing you to go after the business behind the spam.
I'd started building an anti-spam site (I was going to call it "Spamintology") and I was planning to launch it with the number up front, suggesting that people call her to tell her what a bad boy her son was.
But I didn't. Because after the visions of glory, I had visions of my own mother's phone ringing off the hook as spammers called her to complain about me. And that's when I cancelled my plans for the site.
These spammers are often criminals, and always scumbags. If you really start to hurt them, hit them where they live, you risk them trying to hurt you back. That's why I decided to abandon my crusade, because I wasn't so altruistic as to put myself and my family in the line of virtual fire for the sake of zinging Spamford.
Some spam will be stopped by current anti-spam laws under proposal, but the only way to truly stop spam is going to be to take it out of the hands of the FTC and put it into the hands of the FBI. Spam will slow when we see spammers on the evening news, walking into federal courthouses to defend themselves against RICO charges like John Gotti.
If we put together an FBI Anti-Spam unit on par with the FBI's Organized Crime unit at its height, we'd see spam decrease and the nightly news would be entertaining again... for a while.
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
In the UK, we had an article on TV recently where they discovered that a large percentage of spam comes from Flrida.
If someone from the US now starts discovering it actually comes from Argentina, it sounds like they are doing a PR damage limitation exercise instead of journalism.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
Go for it!
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin